Yoast &bull; SEO for everyonehttps://yoast.com
SEO for everyoneMon, 21 Jan 2019 15:58:21 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.8https://yoast.com/app/uploads/2015/09/cropped-Yoast_Favicon_512x512-32x32.pngYoast &bull; SEO for everyonehttps://yoast.com
3232New roles in the WordPress project, blocks and WordPress 5.1https://yoast.com/new-roles-in-the-wordpress-project-blocks-and-wordpress-5-1/
https://yoast.com/new-roles-in-the-wordpress-project-blocks-and-wordpress-5-1/#respondMon, 21 Jan 2019 15:58:21 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1706338Today’s roundup is a nice collection of interesting things that happened in the WordPress Community in the last couple of weeks. There’s some very exciting news about expanding the WordPress leadership team and I’ll discuss a couple of new features of the next version of WordPress. Expanding WordPress Leadership Matt Mullenweg published a post this […]

]]>Today’s roundup is a nice collection of interesting things that happened in the WordPress Community in the last couple of weeks. There’s some very exciting news about expanding the WordPress leadership team and I’ll discuss a couple of new features of the next version of WordPress.

Expanding WordPress Leadership

Matt Mullenweg published a post this week on the Make WordPress site where he announced two new roles to be added to the WordPress Leadership team. The first new role is that of Executive Director and will be taken on by Josepha Haden. The second role is that of Marketing & Communications Lead and our very own Joost de Valk will be taking on that role. This is what Joost had to say about it:

WordPress is paving the cowpaths for the web with projects like Gutenberg, I’m looking forward to leading marketing & comms for WordPress and working with everybody to tell the story of this awesome project and community.

Both new roles combined mark a great step forward for the growth of the WordPress Project as a whole.

Genesis 2.8 introduces Gutenberg based onboarding feature

Genesis, the leading theme framework, has introduced an onboarding feature that is based on Gutenberg. Basically, a set of preformatted and configured blocks (called Block Templates) are made available when you activate a Genesis Child Theme. This is what they had to say about it in the Genesis 2.8 announcement post:

Genesis 2.8 includes a new onboarding feature theme that authors can use to define which demo content is loaded when a user installs a new theme. One-Click Demo Install makes it easy for theme authors to load in plugins and perfectly-designed Gutenberg blocks onto the home page of a new site using that theme.

The Gutenberg project may have had some people doubting over the need for a new editor, but integrations like this – alongside an improved editing experience – that make it awesome. And this is only the beginning: it’s one of the first types of integrations like this.

Block plugins

In fact, there are already a couple of really interesting plugins out there that provide for extra custom blocks. We, of course, have our own Yoast SEO How-To and FAQ block (and there are many more on their way), but here are six interesting block providing plugins you should definitely check out:

As I’ve mentioned in a previous roundup, WordPress.org has a dedicated view for plugins that provide blocks as a library or as an enhancement to their already existing core functionality. You should definitely check that out if you haven’t already.

What next for WordPress 5.1

The next WordPress release is called 5.1 and is scheduled for the 21st of February 2019. The work for 5.1 began long before the launch of WordPress 5.0 and therefore it’ll have two very interesting features:

Fatal Error Protection

WordPress 5.1 will introduce a so-called WSOD protection (white-screen-of-death protection). This feature will recognize when a fatal error occurs, and which plugin or theme is causing it. With this new feature, you’ll still be able to access the WordPress Dashboard and the respective plugin or theme will be paused. This allows users to still log in to their site so that they can at least temporarily fix the problem.

PHP upgrade notice

If your site is still running on an old and insecure version of PHP, WordPress 5.1 will let you know after the upgrade. The lowest PHP version still receiving security updates is currently 7.1. This means all the PHP 5.x versions are outdated and insecure and the PHP upgrade notice is intended to get people to have their hosting companies change the PHP version. With the latest PHP versions seriously boosting your performance as well, trust me, you want to be on the latest and greatest, as it will make your site faster.

You can read more about these features in Felix Arntz’s introduction post on the Make WordPress Core blog. And that’s it for this roundup. What are you most excited about?

]]>https://yoast.com/new-roles-in-the-wordpress-project-blocks-and-wordpress-5-1/feed/0On Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0https://yoast.com/on-gutenberg-and-wordpress-5-0/
https://yoast.com/on-gutenberg-and-wordpress-5-0/#respondMon, 21 Jan 2019 10:22:40 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1705765A while ago, we gave the advice not to upgrade to WordPress 5.0 as it was nearing release. I’m happy to say that as of about a week ago, we feel we’re happy for everyone to move to WordPress 5.0 and start using Gutenberg. Of course, we still advise you to make sure you test how […]

We were honestly scared of the WordPress 5.0 release. As it turned out, there were some serious performance issues within Gutenberg that needed addressing. But, all of those have since been addressed. The overall load on our support team has honestly been negligible. WordPress 5.0.3, the current release as of me writing this, is good. In fact, you can get the best version of Yoast SEO we have right now by upgrading to 5.0 and starting to use Gutenberg.

Working with Gutenberg is very nice. In fact, our content team here at Yoast, who were also skeptical in the beginning, have been asking for the team to enable Gutenberg on yoast.com. I think that’s a testament to how awesome it is and I look forward to improving Yoast SEO in it even more!

Note: If you need plugin support, please be aware that we’ll advise you to upgrade to 5.0 and no longer support 4.8.x.

]]>https://yoast.com/on-gutenberg-and-wordpress-5-0/feed/0Which posts to update first: low ranking or low CTR?https://yoast.com/video/ask-yoast-low-ranking-low-ctr/
Fri, 18 Jan 2019 14:12:53 +0000https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_videos&p=1707662Tackling your site improvements with solid data, is always a good idea. And, to find loads of interesting data, all you have to do is go to Google Search Console. It can tell you how often a specific page is shown, or how often people clicked on your website in Google’s search results, for example. […]

]]>Tackling your site improvements with solid data, is always a good idea. And, to find loads of interesting data, all you have to do is go to Google Search Console. It can tell you how often a specific page is shown, or how often people clicked on your website in Google’s search results, for example. Valuable information for a site owner!

But, having access to all this data is most useful when you know what everything means. And, you probably can’t make all the necessary changes all at once. So, how do you prioritize, to quickly get some returns on your efforts?

Ana emailed us, wondering about the best place to start improving:

To improve our on-site SEO, we want to update our posts based on Google Search Console data. Which should we update first: low ranking posts or low CTR posts?

Watch the video or read the transcript for my answer!

Quick wins when updating your posts with GSC data

“Well, to be honest, the low CTR posts can probably be improved just by improving the title and the description. Because if you have a low click-through rate but it’s already ranking, then you should just make sure that people see that they’ll get what they want.

For the low ranking posts, you’ll need to adapt the copy as well, to make them rank better. So, I would go with the low CTR posts first as that’s probably less work for the same gain and then start with the low ranking posts. Good luck!”

]]>Networking for bloggers: why, how and wherehttps://yoast.com/networking-for-bloggers/
https://yoast.com/networking-for-bloggers/#commentsThu, 17 Jan 2019 14:17:00 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1617536As a blogger, you are probably doing your best to grow your audience on a daily basis. You’re optimizing for Google, Pinterest, social media and you do your best to set up and maintain a social media strategy. But, if you want to take your blog to the next level, there’ll come a point you […]

]]>As a blogger, you are probably doing your best to grow your audience on a daily basis. You’re optimizing for Google, Pinterest, social media and you do your best to set up and maintain a social media strategy. But, if you want to take your blog to the next level, there’ll come a point you will need the help of your fellow bloggers. In this post, I will explain why you need a network, as well as how and where to build it.

Want to expand your network? YoastCon 2019 is the perfect occasion to grow your network. Meet like-minded people and work on your blog’s SEO at the same time! Don’t worry about going alone, we even have single tables where you can get in touch with fellow bloggers, site owners and Yoast folks easily. See you on February 7 & 8 in Nijmegen!

Why you need to network as a blogger

We all know that writing is one of the most lonely professions in the world. Although blogging may not seem as lonely at first glance – you engage with your readers on a daily basis – there’s a high chance you work alone.

As a writer, you often live inside your head. Your audience will only ever see your end result: a blog post or social media post. They won’t see the process of you thinking up your idea, killing your darlings or debating whether to write a certain article. You often take those decisions by yourself, or run them by your spouse or best friend.

While this is a valid approach, someone who is not ‘in the business’, can only help to a certain extent. While it’s often worth it to discuss certain ideas with your personal network, you’ll probably only ever touch the surface.

You might, for example, contemplate archiving your entire Instagram profile to start with a clean slate. Your best friend thinks you’re stupid, while you see bloggers around you do this and grow their following rapidly over the course of several months. And you might be left wondering if you’re cut out for this thing called ‘becoming an influencer’. If you’re at this point, you need a network of people who are like-minded.

At Yoast, I have a lot of colleagues to talk to whenever I need help. I know which person I should ask about SEO, which person knows a lot about Google Analytics and who can help me out when I broke my laptop – again. You need that kind of network for your blog as well. It’s very helpful to create a network so you can discuss certain topics: from SEO to developing websites, and from press releases to personal invitations. If you want to grow, you need a network.

How to network as a blogger

Truth be told, we’re in it for us. This means that everyone you’ll meet, is in it to gain something for themselves. This could be knowledge, reputation, information, cash, products or something else.

Knowing this, you’ll understand you can’t just go to someone you don’t know and ask them for that piece of information you want. You might not get an answer or, in the unlikely chance you do get one, it probably is an evasive one. You need to adopt an open source kind of mentality while networking. This means that you’ll share your knowledge with the world and eventually will receive information in return.

I’ll take myself as an example. Although I knew quite a few bloggers online, my network didn’t really grow until I went to a Dutch blog conference last June, to speak about SEO. I told the crowd that I was going to share my secrets with them, and told them, honestly, how weird it felt to do that, because I might very well kill my own blog this way.

Strangely, or perhaps not so strange at all, the opposite happened. My blog took off and with it, my network expanded tremendously. People knew where to find me, how to find me, and, also, that I was willing to help look into issues or questions.

I answered each question I got, because I love helping out. Did I request favors for each question I answered? No. Was I offered help in return for answering questions or solving issues? You bet! Often, I told people not to worry about it, that I loved to help and that I’d be sure to let them know if they could help me out. And I took people up on their offer, twice now. One of them even got me an invite for a press event of the Walt Disney Company – I mean, it’s Disney!

Where to network as a blogger

You might feel very willing to network with your fellow blog colleagues out there, but where to find them? If you’ve been on your own for a very long time, it can be tricky to get started. Don’t worry; there are various places where you can network as a blogger, both offline and online.

Online networking as a blogger

As your blog lives online, the easiest way to create a network is online as well. There are a lot of Facebook groups for bloggers in all sorts of niches and all kinds of languages. They’re created by bloggers like you and me. Try to find the groups where you can help other bloggers. I, myself, am in various groups, where I answer questions about the Yoast SEO plugins, SEO in general, WordPress or technical questions, as these are things I can help others with. In return, people help me when I have questions about Pinterest, Instagram or about certain press events that I’d like to attend.

Offline networking as a blogger

Offline networking is even more important than building a network online. While online it’s perhaps easier to mingle in discussions on forums, Facebook, or in Twitter conversations, the deeper and longer lasting connections will often start offline. Have you considered going to a local WordPress meetup, a WordCamp or a blog event in your city or country? These can be quite valuable – trust me, this is where the good stuff happens! If you’re unsure where to start, let me suggest YoastCon.

YoastCon for offline networking

YoastCon is a conference organized by Yoast. It focuses on SEO for all types of websites. I can guarantee you it will certainly focus on blogs as well! The conference will take place 7 and 8 February 2019 in the Netherlands. You’ll not only learn all there is to know about SEO from the very best in the field, there’s also plenty of networking opportunities.

Value your network!

Networking is not about transactions. It’s about building relationships, about finding the people you wish to work with and affiliate yourself with. It’s extremely valuable to invest in networking and maintaining relationships with your fellow bloggers. You never know when they’ll cross your path again or what you could mean for each other in the future. I would love to hear how you go about this, especially if it’s your fulltime job. And of course, let me know if I’ll see you at YoastCon! I would love to meet and talk in real life.

]]>https://yoast.com/networking-for-bloggers/feed/8Image SEO: alt tag and title tag optimizationhttps://yoast.com/image-seo-alt-tag-and-title-tag-optimization/
https://yoast.com/image-seo-alt-tag-and-title-tag-optimization/#commentsWed, 16 Jan 2019 13:30:51 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=502396Adding images to your articles encourages people to read them, and well-chosen images can also back up your message and get you a good ranking in image search results. But you should always remember to give your images good alt attributes: alt text strengthens the message of your articles with search engine spiders and improves […]

]]>Adding images to your articles encourages people to read them, and well-chosen images can also back up your message and get you a good ranking in image search results. But you should always remember to give your images good alt attributes: alt text strengthens the message of your articles with search engine spiders and improves the accessibility of your website. This article explains all about alt tags and title tags and why you should optimize them.

Note: the term “alt tag” is a commonly used abbreviation of what’s actually an alt attribute on an img tag. The alt tag of any image on your site should describe what’s on it. Screen readers for the blind and visually impaired will read out this text and therefore make your image accessible.

What are alt tags and title tags?

This is a complete HTML image tag:

<img src=“image.jpg” alt=“image description” title=“image tooltip”>

The alt and title attributes of an image are commonly referred to as alt tag or alt text and title tag – even though they’re not technically tags. The alt text describes what’s on the image and the function of the image on the page. So if you are using an image as a button to buy product X, the alt text should say: “button to buy product X.”

The alt tag is used by screen readers, which are browsers used by blind and visually impaired people, to tell them what is on the image. The title attribute is shown as a tooltip when you hover over the element, so in the case of an image button, the image title could contain an extra call-to-action, like “Buy product X now for $19!”, although this is not a best practice.

Each image should have an alt text, not just for SEO purposes but also because blind and visually impaired people won’t otherwise know what the image is about, but a title attribute is not required. What’s more, most of the time it doesn’t make sense to add it. They are only available to mouse (or other pointing devices) users and the only one case where the title attribute is required for accessibility is on <iframe> and <frame> tags.

If the information conveyed by the title attribute is relevant, consider making it available somewhere else, in plain text and if it’s not relevant, consider removing the title attribute entirely.

But what if an image doesn’t have a purpose?

If you have images in your design that are purely there for design reasons, you’re doing it wrong, as those images should be in your CSS and not in your HTML. If you really can’t change these images, give them an empty alt attribute, like so:

<img src="image.png" alt="">

The empty alt attribute makes sure that screen readers skip over the image.

alt text and SEO

Google’s article about images has a heading “Use descriptive alt text”. This is no coincidence because Google places a relatively high value on alt text to determine not only what is on the image but also how it relates to the surrounding text. This is why, in our Yoast SEO content analysis, we have a feature that specifically checks that you have at least one image with an alt tag that contains your focus keyphrase.

Yoast SEO checks for images and their alt text in your posts:We’re definitely not saying you should spam your focus keyphrase into every alt tag. You need good, high quality, related images for your posts, where it makes sense to have the focus keyword in the alt text. Here’s Google’s advice on choosing a good alt text:

When choosing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page. Avoid filling alt attributes with keywords (keyword stuffing) as it results in a negative user experience and may cause your site to be seen as spam.

If your image is of a specific product, include both the full product name and the product ID in the alt tag so that it can be more easily found. In general: if a keyphrase could be useful for finding something that is on the image, include it in the alt tag if you can. Also, don’t forget to change the image file name to be something actually describing what’s on it.

alt and title attributes in WordPress

When you upload an image to WordPress, you can set a title and an alt attribute. By default, it uses the image filename in the title attribute, which, if you don’t enter an alt attribute, it copies to the alt attribute. While this is better than writing nothing, it’s pretty poor practice. You really need to take the time to craft a proper alt text for every image you add to a post — users and search engines will thank you for it. The interface makes it easy: click an image, hit the edit button, and you’ll see this:There’s no excuse for not doing this right, other than laziness. Your (image) SEO will truly benefit if you get these tiny details right. Visually challenged users will also like you all the more for it.

Read more about image SEO?

We have a very popular (and longer) article about Image SEO. That post goes into a ton of different ways to optimize images but is relatively lacking in detail when it comes to alt and title tags — think of this as an add-on to that article. I recommend reading it when you’re done here.

]]>https://yoast.com/image-seo-alt-tag-and-title-tag-optimization/feed/13image alt attributes assessmentwordpress image details with alt attributeHow to check site speedhttps://yoast.com/how-to-check-site-speed/
https://yoast.com/how-to-check-site-speed/#commentsTue, 15 Jan 2019 13:52:47 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1607572Learning how to check your site speed doesn’t need to be daunting. This short guide will give you the basics, and point you in the right direction. There’s no single metric The first thing to understand is that there is no single metric or measurement for ‘speed’. There’s no simple number which you can use […]

]]>Learning how to check your site speed doesn’t need to be daunting. This short guide will give you the basics, and point you in the right direction.

There’s no single metric

The first thing to understand is that there is no single metric or measurement for ‘speed’. There’s no simple number which you can use to measure how quickly your pages load.

Think about what happens when you load a website. There are lots of different stages and many different parts which can be measured. If the network connection is slow, but the images load quickly, how ‘fast’ is the site? What about the other way around?

Even if you try to simplify all of this to something like “the time it takes until it’s completely loaded“, it’s still tricky to give that a useful number.

For example, a page which takes longer to ‘finish loading’ may provide a functional ‘lightweight’ version while the full page is still downloading in the background. Is that ‘faster’ or ‘slower’ than a website which loads faster, but which I can’t use until it’s finished loading?

The answer is, “it depends”, and there are many different ways in which we can think about or measure ‘site speed’.

Understanding the loading process

From the moment when you click on a link (or hit ‘enter’ in your URL bar), a process begins to load the page you requested.

That process contains many steps, but they can be grouped into broad stages which looks something like this:

While Google’s documentation might be a bit ambitious about the timings of these stages, the model is helpful. Essentially, the process can be described as three stages of loading.

1. Network stuff

First up, the physical hardware of your device needs to connect to the Internet. Usually, that involves moving data through transatlantic fibre cables. That means that you’re limited by the speed of light, and how quickly your device can process information.

It’s hard to measure or impact this part of the process!

2. Server stuff

Here, your device asks your server for a page, and the server prepares and returns the response.

This section can get a bit technical, as it’s focused on the performance of server hardware, databases and scripts. You may need to ask for help from your hosting provider or tech team.

We can measure the performance of the server with tools like NewRelic or DataDog, which monitors how your site behaves and responds from the ‘inside’.

They’ll provide charts and metrics around things like slow database queries and slow scripts. Armed with this information, you can get a better understanding if your hosting is up to scratch and if you need to make code changes to your theme/plugins/scripts.

WordPress has some great plugins for doing this kind of analysis, too – I’m a big fan of Query Monitor. This provides some great insight into which bits of WordPress might be slowing you down – whether it’s your themes, plugins, or environments.

3. Browser stuff

This stage is where the page needs to be constructed, laid out, colored in, and displayed. The way in which images load, in which JavaScript and CSS are processed, and every individual HTML tag on your page affects how quickly things load.

We can monitor some of this from the ‘outside-in’ with tools which scan the website and measure how it loads. We recommend using multiple tools, as they measure things differently, and are useful for different assessments. For example:

WebPageTest is great for providing a ‘waterfall’ view of the website, and how all of the assets load.

These kinds of tools are great for spotting things like images which need to be optimized, where your CSS or JavaScript is slow, or where you’re waiting for assets to load from other domains.

Universal metrics

Despite all of these moving parts, there are a few universal metrics which make sense for all sites to measure, and optimize for. These are:

Time until first byte, which is how long it takes until the server responds with some information. Even if your front-end is blazing fast, this will hold you up. Measure with Query Monitor or NewRelic.

Time until first contentful (and meaningful) paint, which is how long it takes for key visual content (e.g., a hero image or a page heading) to appear on the screen. Measure with Lighthouse for Chrome.

Time until interactive, which is how long it takes for the experience to be visible, and react to my input. Measure with Lighthouse for Chrome.

These are much more sophisticated metrics than “how long did it take to load”, and, perhaps more importantly, have a user-centric focus. Improving these metrics should correlate directly with user satisfaction, which is super-important for SEO.

Wrapping this into a process

Use an ‘outside-in’ tool, like WebPageTest to generate a waterfall diagram of how the website loads.

Identify bottlenecks with servers and the back end. Look for slow connection times, slow SSL handshakes, and slow DNS lookups. Use a plugin like Query Monitor, or a service like NewRelic to diagnose what’s holding things up. Make server, hardware, software and script changes.

Identify bottlenecks with the front end. Look for slow loading and processing times on images, scripts and stylesheets. Use a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse for Chrome for suggestions on how to streamline how the page loads.

Use Lighthouse for Chrome to measure your key metrics, like time until first meaningfulpaint and time until interactive.

]]>https://yoast.com/how-to-check-site-speed/feed/12One second timelineThe "one second timeline" from <a href="https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/mobile">Google's site speed documentation</a>newrelicquery-monitor-wordpress-pluginQuery Monitoryoast-waterfallWebPageTest results for yoast.comlighthouse-yoastA Lighthouse report for yoast.comSEO Anti-patterns: 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepagehttps://yoast.com/seo-anti-patterns-301-redirect-all-your-404s-to-your-homepage/
https://yoast.com/seo-anti-patterns-301-redirect-all-your-404s-to-your-homepage/#commentsMon, 14 Jan 2019 14:00:06 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1694838Sometimes I encounter new “SEO hacks” that people apply, that are actually anti-patterns. One of these new anti-patterns I noticed is the pattern of 301 redirecting all your 404 pages to your homepage. Let me explain why this is a lot like cleaning up your room by throwing everything into a drawer and what the […]

]]>Sometimes I encounter new “SEO hacks” that people apply, that are actually anti-patterns. One of these new anti-patterns I noticed is the pattern of 301 redirecting all your 404 pages to your homepage. Let me explain why this is a lot like cleaning up your room by throwing everything into a drawer and what the better solution would be.

The premise of this SEO hack

The premise of this hack is that 404 errors are counted by Google, and that through some magic the number of errors on your site affects your site’s overall ability to rank. The solution, that really isn’t a solution, that people come up with is then to start 301 redirecting all error pages to their homepage. Let me quote some of the reasons people give for doing this:

to siphon Google Page Rank (TM) from missing pages to the homepage

If you care about your website, you should take steps to avoid 404 errors as it affects your SEO badly.

I have a website, every time I login to Google webmaster tools, I found many new discovered 404 error links, the problem is not in 404 errors itself, but when Google see them and count them for you!

Let’s be clear: we’ll be the first to tell you that you should keep an eye on your 404 errors and try to fix them where possible. Google indeed shows a graph of your 404 errors in Google Search Console and lowering the number of 404s on your site is often a good idea. That doesn’t mean that your site shouldn’t have any 404s.

Let me go back to my analogy of throwing everything into your drawer when your dad or mom told you to clean up your room. Everything, in this case, means not just the dirty clothes, or your toys, but also that half emptied milk carton, that half-finished sandwich, etc. You know what that makes your drawer when you clean up your room like that? A mess. And soon your whole room will start to stink because you cleaned up like that. This situation is no different.

I verified this with Google before I wrote this article, see John Mueller’s response:

Yeah, it's not a great practice (confuses users), and we mostly treat them as 404s anyway (they're soft-404s), so there's no upside. It's not critically broken/bad, but additional complexity for no good reason – make a better 404 page instead.

As John explains: when you do this blanket redirect, all those URLs are treated as 404s. So none of them spread value. So the premises listed above are all wrong. On top of that, by 301 redirecting all your 404 pages, you throw away the opportunity to find real errors on your site and fix them.

Better solution to 404s

The better solution for this problem of having too many 404s is much more granular. You see, 404 redirects can exist for lots of reasons, and each of those reasons has their own “solution”. For instance:

Someone linked to an article and made a mistake in their URL. If you can redirect that wrong URL to the right article: do so.

How common is this hack?

Together they account for 240,000+ sites that show this behavior and there are probably a lot more.

Stop 301 redirecting all your 404 pages

Now, don’t take this as though we’re telling you not to 301 redirect 404 errors. We’re telling you to do it granularly. There’s nothing wrong with having a few 404 errors on your site, and you should definitely keep an eye on them. The redirect manager in Yoast SEO Premium can make this really easy to do.

]]>https://yoast.com/seo-anti-patterns-301-redirect-all-your-404s-to-your-homepage/feed/21Moving domain and WordPress clean installhttps://yoast.com/video/ask-yoast-moving-domain-wordpress-clean-install/
Fri, 11 Jan 2019 14:49:18 +0000https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_videos&p=1694864The start of a new year is a great moment to work on cleaning up your site and finally doing the work you’ve been putting off. Getting rid of old stuff that’s floating around your site is a typical example of jobs that tend to get postponed. Similarly, the new year is a great time […]

]]>The start of a new year is a great moment to work on cleaning up your site and finally doing the work you’ve been putting off. Getting rid of old stuff that’s floating around your site is a typical example of jobs that tend to get postponed. Similarly, the new year is a great time for a fresh start, if you’ve been planning a bigger change, like moving to another domain. But, it’s always a good idea to give some thought to the best and most efficient way to approach tasks like this.

If you’re moving to a new domain, for example, you probably want to continue your website, but with a clean slate. So, if you manage your switch right, could it save you time cleaning up? And, is using the WordPress export – import functionality a good way to approach this? Let’s discuss!

Muhammad Asaadi emailed us saying,

“I’m moving my WordPress website to another domain. I want to have a clean install of WordPress and move only my posts and pages using the WordPress built-in export import tool and then manage internal links with 301 redirects using Yoast SEO Premium. Is that a good way to approach this?”

Watch the video or read the transcript for my answer!

Handling a clean install and domain switch

“Well, I don’t know which problem you’re solving. You’ve probably got a lot of old stuff hanging around that you think you can get rid of. Importing and exporting using the WordPress import tool can lead to a lot of lost data. It doesn’t always import and export everything right.

I don’t know whether that’s the best way of going about it. Usually it’s better to just go through the database and see like, okay, what can I delete, which pits are no longer needed.

That requires a bit of a professional though, so if you can’t do that yourself, just hire someone to do that for you. Usually, you’re better off doing that than trying to use the import export tool for something that
you really can’t do all that well. Good luck!”

]]>Don’t miss these SEO workshops at YoastCon (Feb 7 & 8)https://yoast.com/seo-workshops-yoastcon/
https://yoast.com/seo-workshops-yoastcon/#commentsThu, 10 Jan 2019 14:56:47 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1694023YoastCon is just around the corner. We’re already starting to get nervous, excited and anxious. It’s going to be so very amazing. Our speaker line-up is crazy. We’ve managed to get together the very best of the SEO community in one place for two whole days. But besides these amazing speakers, we’ve also scheduled some […]

]]>YoastCon is just around the corner. We’re already starting to get nervous, excited and anxious. It’s going to be so very amazing. Our speaker line-up is crazy. We’ve managed to get together the very best of the SEO community in one place for two whole days. But besides these amazing speakers, we’ve also scheduled some kickass workshops you don’t want to miss. Read all about these workshops here!

Why workshops?

In the many, many talks you’ll be able to attend at YoastCon on February 7 and 8, you’ll probably get lots of SEO tips. Let’s put into practice these tips immediately! That’s what we’ll help you with in our workshops.

In all of these workshops, you’ll have to work yourself. Our team will be there to assist you and help you with your own site, right there at YoastCon. You’ll have every opportunity to ask questions to our SEO experts, because the groups will be small.

Which SEO workshops?

You’ll be able to follow workshops on SEO copywriting, Site structure and Keyword research. In all of these workshops, our very own Yoast Academy team will help you out with your questions. We’ll give you a step-by-step tutorial on just how to write an amazing SEO-friendly text. Or, we’ll help you to rethink your site’s structure or to begin your keyword research. You can attend these workshops both in English and Dutch.

We’ll also host a workshop in which we’ll teach you the ins and outs of the Yoast SEO plugin. Are you getting everything out of it? There might be features you haven’t discovered yet, that can save you costly time. We’ll teach you how to use Yoast SEO to its full extent in this workshop. You can attend it both in Dutch and English.

On top of that, we offer workshops in which you can learn how to Review your own website. During this workshop, you’ll dive into your own website. How optimized is it? Are there any gaps or flaws? Learn what to do to make search engines love it! Our SEO team will teach you how to thoroughly review your own website. You can immediately bring all this new knowledge into practice. You can attend it both in English and Dutch.

Finally, we offer a workshop for developers: Thinking about code: creating a CMS using DDD. Are you experienced with programming and basic design patterns? Then this workshop is for you. You’ll take an architectural look at content management and explore creating your own CMS. It will be in English and will be conducted entirely on paper!

All workshops will take one hour and a half, except for the technical workshop which will take three hours.

]]>https://yoast.com/seo-workshops-yoastcon/feed/3The beginner’s guide to Google Search Consolehttps://yoast.com/beginners-guide-to-google-search-console/
https://yoast.com/beginners-guide-to-google-search-console/#commentsWed, 09 Jan 2019 14:30:55 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1287462Do you have your own website or maintain the website of the company you work for? Of course, to do this right, you need to keep a keen eye on the performance of your website. Google offers several tools to collect and analyze data of your website. You probably have heard of Google Analytics and […]

]]>Do you have your own website or maintain the website of the company you work for? Of course, to do this right, you need to keep a keen eye on the performance of your website. Google offers several tools to collect and analyze data of your website. You probably have heard of Google Analytics and Google Search Console before. These tools are free to use for everyone maintaining a website and can give you very valuable insights about your website.

Why everyone with a website should use Google Search Console

Google Search Console has been created to easily track the performance of your website. You can get valuable insights out of your Google Search Console account which means that you can see what part of your website needs work. This can be a technical part of your website, such as an increasing number of crawl errors that need to be fixed. This can also be giving a specific keyword more attention because the rankings or impressions are decreasing.

Besides seeing this kind of data, you’ll get mail notifications when new errors are noticed by Google Search Console. Because of these notifications, you’re quickly aware of issues you need to fix.

Setting up an account

To start using Google Search Console, you’ll need to create an account. Within the new Google Search Console, you can click on ‘add a new property’ in the top bar:

Clicking on the ‘Add a property’ button, you can insert the website you want to add. Make sure you add the right URL, so with ‘https’ if you have an https website and with or without ‘www’. For collecting the right data, it’s important to add the right version:

When you’ve added a website, you need to verify that you’re the owner. There are several options to verify your ownership.

For WordPress users who use Yoast SEO we recommend using the ‘HTML tag’ method:

You can easily copy this code and paste it into the ‘Webmaster tools’ tab within the Yoast SEO plugin:

After saving this, you can return to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Verify’ button to confirm. If everything is ok, you’ll get a success message and GSC will start collecting data for your website.

Features in Google Search Console

Now you’ve set up your account what would be the next step? Well, it’s time to look at some of your data! We’ll explore some of the reports and information available in the rest of this article.

Performance

Within the performance tab, you can see what pages and what keywords your website ranks for in Google. In the old version of GSC you could see the data of a maximum of the last 90 days but in the new version, it’s possible to see the data up to 16 months. Keep in mind that the data is available from the moment you set up your account.

If you check the performance tab regularly, you can quickly see what keywords or what pages need some more attention and optimization. So where to begin? Within the performance tab, you see a list of ‘queries’, ‘pages’, ‘countries’ or ‘devices’. Each of those sections can be sorted by the number of ‘clicks’, ‘impressions’, ‘average CTR’ or ‘average position’. We’ll explain each of them below:

1. Clicks

The amount of clicks tells you how often people clicked on your website in the search results of Google. This number can tell something about the performance of your page titles and meta descriptions: if just a few people click on your result, your result might not stand out in the search results. It could be helpful to check what other results are displayed around you to see what can be optimized for your snippet.

The position of the search result also has an impact on the number of clicks of course. If your page is in the top 3 of Google’s first result page it will automatically get more clicks than a page that ranks on the second page of the search results.

2. Impressions

The impressions tell you how often your website in general or how often a specific page is shown in the search results. For example, in the GSC account of our own website, Yoast SEO is one of the keywords our website ranks for. The number of impressions shown after this keyword shows how often our website is shown for that keyword in the search results of Google. You don’t know yet what page ranks for that keyword.

To see what pages might rank for the specific keyword, you can click on the line of the keyword. Doing this for the keyword [Yoast SEO], the keyword is added as a filter:

After that, you could navigate to the ‘Pages’ tab to see what pages exactly rank for this keyword. Are those pages the ones you’d want to rank for that keyword? If not, you might need to optimize the page you’d like to rank. Think of writing better content containing the keyword on that page, adding internal links from relevant pages or posts to the page, making the page load faster, etc.

3. Average CTR

The CTR – Click-through rate – tells you what percentage of the people that have seen your website in the search results also clicked through to your website. You probably understand that higher rankings mostly also lead to higher click-through rates.

However, there are also things you can do yourself to increase the CTR. For example, you could rewrite your meta description and make it more appealing. When the description of your site stands out from the other results, more people will probably click on your result and your CTR will increase. Keep in mind that this will not have a big impact if you’re not ranking on the first page yet. You might need to try other things first to improve your ranking.

4. Average position

The last one in this list is the ‘Average position’. This tells you what the average ranking of a specific keyword or page was in the time period you’ve selected. Of course, this position isn’t always reliable since more and more people seem to get different search results. Google seems to understand better and better which results fit best for which visitor. However, this indicator still gives you an idea if the clicks, impressions and the average CTR are explainable.

Index coverage

A more technical but very valuable tab within Google Search Console is the ‘Index coverage’ tab. This section shows how many pages are in the index of Google since the last update, how many pages aren’t and what errors and warnings caused difficulties for Google indexing your pages properly.

We recommend checking this tab regularly to see what errors and warnings appear on your website. However, you also get notifications when Google has found new errors. When you get such a notification you can check the error in more detail here.

You may find that errors are caused when, e.g., a redirect doesn’t seem to work correctly, or Google is finding broken code or error pages in your theme.

Clicking on the link, you can analyze the error more in depth to see what specific URLs are affected. When you’ve fixed the error you can mark it as fixed to make sure Google will test the URL again:

There are a few things you should always look for when checking out your coverage reports:

If you’re writing new content, your indexed pages should be a steadily increasing number. This tells you two things: Google can index your site and you keep your site ‘alive’ by adding content.

Watch out for sudden drops! This might mean that Google is having trouble accessing (all of) your website. Something may be blocking Google; whether it’s robots.txt changes or a server that’s down: you need to look into it!

We recommend that you monitor these types of situations closely and resolve errors quickly, as too many errors could send a signal of low quality (bad maintenance) to Google.

AMP

Below the ‘Index coverage,’ you can find the ‘AMP’ tab. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages: lightning fast mobile pages. If you’ve set up AMP for your website you can check for errors in Google Search Console. Within this section you can see the valid AMP pages, the valid ones with warnings and errors:

Below the chart, the issues are listed. If you click on one of the issues, you can see the affected URLs. Just as in the index section of GSC you can validate your fix if you’ve fixed an issue.

Job Postings

Within this tab, you’ll be able to list your job openings and to track their performance. If there are any errors, you’ll see them in here. It’s not the most important feature of GSC, but it can be valuable for specific companies or websites.

Events

This section provides useful feedback on your structured markup for events. Events can be complex to tag up correctly, so this can be an extremely helpful report for finding out where you need to tweak details like dates and location!

Sitemaps

An XML sitemap is like a roadmap to all important pages and posts on your website. We think every website would benefit from having one. Is our Yoast SEO plugin running on your website? Then you automatically have an XML sitemap. If not, we recommend creating one to make sure Google can find your most important pages and posts easily.

Within the XML sitemap tab of Google Search Console you can tell Google where your XML sitemap is located on your site:

We recommend everyone entering the URL of their XML sitemap into GSC to make Google find it easily. In addition to that, you can quickly see if your sitemap gives errors or if some pages aren’t indexed, for instance. Checking this regularly, you’re sure Google can find and read your XML sitemap correctly.

We recommend regularly checking the XML sitemap section in our plugin to manage which post types or taxonomies you’re including in your sitemaps!

Links

Within the links to your site section, you can see how many links from other sites are pointing to your website. Besides, you can see what websites link, how many links those websites contain to your site and lastly, what anchor texts are used most linking to your website. This can be valuable information because links still are very important for SEO.

Within the internal links section, you can check what pages of your website are most linked from other spots on your site. This list can be valuable to analyze regularly because you want your most important pages and posts to get most internal links. Doing this, you make sure Google understands as well what your cornerstones are.

Mobile usability

The mobile usability tab within this section shows you usability issues with your mobile website or with specific mobile pages. Since mobile traffic is rising all over the world, we recommend checking this regularly. If your mobile site isn’t user-friendly, lots of visitors will leave it quickly.

Manual Actions

The manual actions tab is the one you don’t want to see anything in. If your site is penalized by Google, you’ll get more information in here. If your site is affected by a manual action, you’ll also get messaged via email.

There are a number of scenarios which can lead to these kinds of penalties, including:

You have unnatural/bought links
Make sure from and to your site are valuable, not just for SEO. Preferably your links come from and link to related content that is valuable for your readers.

Your site has been hackedA message stating your site’s probably hacked by a third party. Google might label your site as compromised or lower your rankings.

You’re hiding something from Google
If you’re ‘cloaking’ (that is, intentionally showing different to content than to users, for the purposes of decieving either of them), or using ‘sneaky’ redirects (e.g., hiding affiliate URLs), then you’re violating of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Spammy structured markup
If you use rich snippets for too many irrelevant elements on a page, or mark up content that is hidden to the visitor, that might be considered spammy. Mark up what’s necessary, and not everything is necessary.

Missing features in the new version of Google Search Console

As you might have noticed not all features are integrated yet into the new version of Google Search Console. Google explains that this could have two reasons: they may have found a better way of presenting the data or they’re still in the process of migrating the feature to the new version. As said before, we’ll update this post when there’s progress made in the migration.

The old version of GSC is still available for everyone. So, why should you switch back to the old version once in a while? We’ll list the features that are missing in the new version, but that seems valuable to keep an eye on, below.

Search appearance

From the ‘Search appearance’ section of the old Google Search Console, we miss the following features in the new version: ‘Structured data‘, ‘Rich cards‘, ‘Data highlighter‘ and the ‘HTML improvements‘.

If you’ve added structured data to your website we recommend checking the structured data tab of the old version regularly. Here you’ll see if all structured data is recognized by Google and errors will be listed. If you’ve added structured data meant for rich cards, you can check for errors in the rich cards tab. The data highlighter can be used to markup your pages without having to code yourself. You can read more in-depth about Google Search Console and structured data here.

In the last missing feature of the search appearance tab, the HTML improvements, you can easily check, for instance, for duplicate titles or quite short titles which can be improved. These listings can be an easy pick: optimizing your titles and meta descriptions might increase your rankings and CTR.

International targeting

The international targeting tab is important for websites who have pages in different languages and who target people in different countries or regions. When you’ve implemented hreflang to your website, you can check for errors within this section of GSC.

Crawl stats

In the crawl tab, you can find the sections ‘Crawl errors’, ‘Crawl stats’, ‘Fetch as Google’, ‘Robots.txt tester’, ‘Sitemaps’ and ‘URL parameters’.

It seems that you can find some crawl errors in the new index coverage tag but if we look at our account, we don’t see all crawl errors in the new version. This means that it’s important to check your crawl errors still in the old version of GSC. When you’ve fixed a crawl error you can mark it as fixed. The crawl stats aren’t included yet so you can find those stats in the old version.

The crawl stats tell you something about how many pages are crawled per day, how many kilobytes are downloaded per day and how many time was spent downloading a page. If one of the graphs seem to decrease, you know it’s time to do something about it.

The fetch as Google feature gives you the opportunity to see if Google can access a specific page correctly, how it exactly renders the page and if there are blocked resources on the page. You can test your pages both for desktop as for mobile to see the differences between those.

The robots.txt tester is made to add your robots.txt and to test if any errors or warnings seem to appear. You can also add specific URLs to check whether they’re blocked or not.

The sitemaps are already moved to the new version of GSC so it’s time for the last feature of the crawl tab: URL parameters. In the URL Parameters section, you can add parameters for your website and ‘tell’ Google how they should be handled. If you want to use this, we recommend reading the guidelines carefully. Don’t just add some parameters to see what happens. This can cause serious problems with your site’s SEO.

Security issues

Last but not least: within the security issues tab you’ll get a notification when your website seems to have a security issue.

Do you already use Google Search Console for your website? If not, we definitely recommend creating an account so you can start collecting data about your website. Do you think something is missing? Feel free to leave a comment!

]]>https://yoast.com/beginners-guide-to-google-search-console/feed/45Google search console - add propertygsc-add-propertygsc-ownershipgsc-verificationGoogle search console - performanceKeyword filterIndex coverageSubmitted URL not found (404)AMP errorgsc-jobsgsc-eventsAdd a new sitemapgsc-linksgsc-links-pagegsc-mobile-usabilityWhy you should try out the new Yoast SEO analysishttps://yoast.com/why-try-out-new-yoast-seo-analysis/
https://yoast.com/why-try-out-new-yoast-seo-analysis/#commentsTue, 08 Jan 2019 11:36:30 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1693567In next couple of months, Yoast SEO 10.0 will see the light of day. In it, you’ll find a brand new SEO analysis. One that’s based on thorough SEO research. Last year, we evaluated all existing assessments and added new ones to make the analysis reflect the search engines of today. You can now try […]

]]>In next couple of months, Yoast SEO 10.0 will see the light of day. In it, you’ll find a brand new SEO analysis. One that’s based on thorough SEO research. Last year, we evaluated all existing assessments and added new ones to make the analysis reflect the search engines of today. You can now try out this brand new analysis! In Yoast SEO 9.4 you can easily switch from the current to the new analysis (and back). So, go ahead and see if your content meets the SEO standards of today! We’d love to hear your feedback.

Why a new analysis?

Search engines evolve. What used to be important a decade ago might not be relevant today. As search engines become smarter, our SEO analysis should too! That’s why we decided to test if all our checks are still relevant.

A multidisciplinary team, consisting of SEO experts, linguists and developers, scrutinized the SEO analysis: Are some SEO assessment redundant nowadays? Should we add new ones? Or change the weight of certain factors? We checked all of them, removed some, added a new assessment and adapted the calculations. For details on the changes in the new analysis, please check the release post of Yoast SEO 9.4.

This video shows why and how we changed the Yoast SEO analysis:

Why try it out?

This is your chance to find out if your content stands the test of time! Try the most advanced SEO analysis out there. See what happens to your posts’ scores. Are they still optimized, do you still get an overall green bullet for your post?

Of course, we tested this new version extensively. But before we push this change to millions of Yoast SEO users, we like to see how it works with your content. Your feedback will help us fine-tune the analysis before we release Yoast SEO 10.0.

What happens if you test?

First of all: don’t fret! Nothing will happen to your posts or their rankings. It’s just the SEO scores that will be recalculated. And that’s what we’re interested in. Did your scores change? Did you get more green or red bullets? How do you feel about the new assessment? Do you think the feedback you get on your content makes sense?

If you participate, we’d like to ask you some questions about your experiences. So, if you switch to the new analysis, you’ll receive two short questionnaires we’d like to ask you to fill out: one a couple of weeks after you switched, and one after you’ve been using it for a while. Please share your thoughts, because we value your feedback!

How do you participate in this test?

Switching is easy. Go to the Yoast SEO settings in the sidebar of your WordPress dashboard. Click on General and select the features tab. You’ll see this screen:

Here you use the toggle to turn on the new Yoast SEO analysis. That’s it! Now your content will be analyzed according to the latest standards in SEO. Don’t like it? You can easily toggle back to the old analysis too!

Make sure that you are updated to Yoast SEO 9.4 in order to try the beta!

]]>https://yoast.com/why-try-out-new-yoast-seo-analysis/feed/53Why you should try out the new Yoast SEO analysis &bull; YoastIn our 9.4 release you'll find a beta of a new Yoast SEO analysis. Find out if your content is still up to scratch and help us by giving feedback!Content SEOrecalibration toggle yoast seo 9.4Yoast SEO 9.4: Help us beta test the new SEO analysis!https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-9-4/
https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-9-4/#commentsTue, 08 Jan 2019 11:31:54 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1690219Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about SEO. We felt the impact quality content and a technically flawless site has on a successful SEO strategy, so we built tools that help you to improve your own site. We’ve developed a strong set of defaults that can be applied to a broad spectrum of sites. […]

]]>Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about SEO. We felt the impact quality content and a technically flawless site has on a successful SEO strategy, so we built tools that help you to improve your own site. We’ve developed a strong set of defaults that can be applied to a broad spectrum of sites. As with everything, after a while, you need to evaluate what you are doing and see if you can make improvements. That’s what we did — in Yoast SEO 9.4, you’ll find an updated SEO analysis that you can beta test. It will be released in Yoast SEO 10.

Help us test the new SEO analysis, due for Yoast SEO 10

SEO is always changing. What worked years ago, might not work anymore. Sometimes ‘rules’ have become stricter, while other times looser. Since there is no SEO rulebook, we need to rely on experience, common sense and expert insights to make the right decisions. We need to keep up-to-date so we can keep our plugin up-to-date so we can keep you up-to-date, so to say.

Our latest project does just that. We carefully selected several Yoasters from different backgrounds — SEO experts, content specialists, linguists and developers — to form the research team that needed to align Yoast SEO with the latest insights in SEO. The outcome of this research, combined with your feedback, inform the choices we make that will result in the release of a new and improved SEO analysis in Yoast SEO 10.

Ready to help? Great! Activate the beta analysis and fill in the questionnaires you’ll receive. We’ll use your feedback to make the final version even better! Here’s more information on why you should test the new SEO analysis.

We need you!

As mentioned, we need feedback. We’re not going to change anything without your input. By activating the beta analysis, you can provide us with insights into how you experience the new analysis. Please use the new version of the SEO analysis like you normally do and report back. You’ll notice that it grades your content slightly different. We’ve made it extremely easy for you to take part in our beta test. Here’s how you can start:

Switch on the toggle for the new SEO analysis in SEO > General > Features

We’ll automatically add you to a special mailing list

Start using the new SEO analysis

Fill out the questionnaires we send you periodically

Success!

Done testing? Simply turn off the beta analysis

What’s changing in the new Yoast SEO analysis?

The project team thoroughly researched current SEO knowledge. They evaluated other SEO tools and writing software and carefully looked at all the analyses in Yoast SEO. Together, they came up with a solid set of improvements for the plugin. You can read more about the project or watch the documentary that gives a great overview of the how and why.

We launched parts of the updated analysis already, like keyword distribution, word form and synonym support in Yoast SEO 9.0. The bulk of the changes, however, will be in Yoast SEO 9.4 — which will eventually become Yoast SEO 10. Here are some of the changes you’ll notice once you activate the new SEO analysis:

New assessment:

A new single H1 assessment: The single H1 assessment checks whether the body of the text contains an H1 at any position other than the very beginning.

Gone from the SEO analysis:

The assessments that check the length of your URL and whether your URL contains stopwords.

Changes to the SEO assessments:

Keyphrase density. This assessment now takes the length of the focus keyphrase into account, because it can be much harder to use a longer keyphrase in your text. In the new version, you’ll need to use your longer keyphrase less often in the text than a shorter keyphrase to get a green bullet. In addition, if you write in English, Yoast SEO Premium recognizes various word forms of your focus keyphrase — for instance, [dog], [dogs] or [dogged]. Naturally, your keyword density becomes higher. This is not because you are trying to over-optimize your text, but just because the plugin became smarter. We adjusted the formula so that you do not get penalized.

Outbound links. We now show a red bullet instead of an orange one whenever we find no external links in a text. The web is built on links and you can help sustain that by adding relevant outbound links wherever it makes sense.

Image alt attributes. As of now, the plugin not only looks at the number of images with alt text on a page but also whether the number of images with the keyphrase in the alt text falls within a certain percentage when you have multiple images, preventing you from over-optimizing.

Keyphrase in title. For various languages, we’ll now filter out function words that precede the keyphrase in the title. This means that if you use words like [the], [on] or [what] before your keyphrase in the title, it won’t affect your score. The analysis will understand that you use your keyphrase at the beginning of your title and you’ll get a green bullet.

Keyphrase length. In the new Yoast SEO analysis, languages without function word support can have longer focus keyphrases, because there might be function words like [the] or [for] between your content words.

Keyphrase in subheading. Depending on whether we’ve already added support for your language, different rules apply when it comes to checking if you used the focus keyphrase in the subheading or not. For supported languages, you need to use all content words in your subheading for it to be recognized as reflecting your topic. For non-supported languages, we will check if you used at least half of the words from your keyphrase within a subheading.

Text length. We’ve upped the word limit for taxonomy pages to a minimum of 250. This gives you more incentive to write enough, good quality content on your tag and category pages, making it easier for search engines to rank these pages.

You can find all the different checks in Yoast SEO on the assessment overview page. Please use the new SEO analysis like you always do and give us your feedback. Together, we make Yoast SEO better than ever!

What else is new in Yoast SEO 9.4

Yoast SEO 9.4 is mostly about the new SEO analysis, but you can find plenty of other enhancements and bug fixes under the hood. For instance, we’ve improved the accessibility of the analysis results and the Title Separator settings. We’ve fixed numerous bugs, including one where pagination elements were not shown in the Genesis theme. In addition, we’ve had a lot of help from Saša Todorović for this release, mostly with WooCommerce related improvements. You can find all the changes in the changelog for this release.

Update and help us improve the next generation SEO analysis!

There you have it. Yoast SEO 9.4 gives you a glimpse of what’s coming to Yoast SEO 10 in the near future. We took a long hard look at the current state of SEO and how Yoast SEO fits into that picture. Where necessary, we made changes that bring Yoast SEO into the now and maybe even the future. What’s more, you can help build that future! We would love for you to help us improve this new SEO analysis. Thanks!

]]>https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-9-4/feed/52Yoast SEO 9.4: Help us beta test the new SEO analysis! &bull; YoastYoast SEO 9.4 brings a beta version of the new SEO analysis that will land in Yoast SEO 10. Please help us test it! Your feedback is invaluable.Yoast SEO,Yoast SEO Premium,Yoast SEO 9.4recalibration toggle yoast seo 9.4Keep your content fresh and up to date!https://yoast.com/keep-your-content-fresh-and-up-to-date/
https://yoast.com/keep-your-content-fresh-and-up-to-date/#commentsMon, 07 Jan 2019 13:57:24 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=844397How do you make sure that all content on your website is still relevant? Why is that even important? For some of you, coming up with new ideas for blog posts seems the biggest challenge of blogging. However, you want your existing posts to show up-to-date content as well. And that could even be a bigger challenge! […]

]]>How do you make sure that all content on your website is still relevant? Why is that even important? For some of you, coming up with new ideas for blog posts seems the biggest challenge of blogging. However, you want your existing posts to show up-to-date content as well. And that could even be a bigger challenge! Here, I’ll explain why it’s worth investing time in having fresh content on your site. I’ll also give you some tips on how to achieve this.

Why is up-to-date content important?

Updating content is essential, because you don’t want people to find information on your website that isn’t valid anymore. If you’ve written a high quality blog post and optimized it well, chances are that people will find that post in the search engines. That was the whole point of writing and optimizing that post in the first place. Imagine a blog that hands out SEO advice to its readers. Older posts shouldn’t contain advice that isn’t valid anymore, because you want people to invest time in SEO strategies that work nowadays.

Why is fresh content important for SEO?

Keeping your content fresh is important for SEO reasons as well. If you rewrite an article, Google will notice changes in that particular article. If you update your content regularly, you’re actually showing Google that your site is alive. You could either update an article – with or without changing the date – or you could republish the post.

Tips on how to keep your content fresh

1. Crucial: update those cornerstones

My most important tip on keeping content up to date is to focus on your cornerstone articles. These articles should be the best articles on your website. These are the articles you want to be found for. So, these should be on the top of your list, while updating content.

In Yoast SEO Premium you can now turn on a beta version of the new SEO analysis, including a stale content filter. This handy feature will let you know whether your cornerstone content hasn’t been updated for 6 months or longer. On top of the post overview you can click on the filter and see which cornerstones you should go through and update. Learn all about testing the new version of the Yoast SEO analysis here

Let me give you an example from Yoast.com. I mostly write about blogging and about content SEO. The most important article about content writing is SEO copywriting: the ultimate guide. Regularly, I write a new blog post about content SEO or about copywriting. I do some research for each and every one of those (I really do!). I discover some new things. These new discoveries should be covered – briefly – in my cornerstone article as well. So, I (should) take the time to update my ultimate guide now and then too. And you should do the same!

2. Update posts that generate a lot of traffic

Updating can be a lot of work. And if your site becomes really large, this could be a day job! If you have to make choices which articles to tackle and update first, take a look at which pages generate a lot of traffic. Start with those. These are the pages that are actually seen by your audience. These pages have the highest priority on showing fresh content.

3. Delete really outdated posts

As your blog is growing and you’re writing tons of blog posts, some of your content slowly becomes really old. Some posts are evergreens, but some posts just aren’t. If these articles aren’t read by anyone either, you could decide to delete them all together. This will clean up your site nicely! If you do decide to delete a post, make sure to read Joost’s post about properly deleting a post.

4. Merge posts that are much alike

If you publish lots of posts – like we do – you’ll end up with some posts that are quite similar. When you’re updating old content, check if you have posts that are much like the one you’re updating. Those posts might diminishes the chance of ranking for the one you’re working on! This phenomenon is called keyword cannibalization. You can solve this by checking which of all these posts on the same topic perform best in the search engines. Update the one that ranks highest and merge the other posts into that one, high quality and complete, blog post.

5. Don’t forget ‘other’ pages

Not only your blog posts should have up-to-date content, other pages are important as well. Don’t forget to update those FAQ. Perhaps new questions have emerged among your audience. Make sure to add those. While updating your website, don’t forget the ‘about page’, the ‘contact page’ and other static pages on your website. I understand that this content doesn’t change that often, but make sure that changes are actually being made!

How to keep content fresh?

Keeping the content of your website up to date and fresh is important if you want to attract readers from the search engines with (somewhat) older posts. While rewriting and refreshening old content, make sure to start with those cornerstones and most popular articles first!

]]>https://yoast.com/keep-your-content-fresh-and-up-to-date/feed/7Ask Yoast: Ranking your service business nationwidehttps://yoast.com/video/ranking-service-business-nationwide/
Fri, 04 Jan 2019 12:47:12 +0000https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_videos&p=1670895Running a local service business is great, but if things are going well, why stop there? While the area you can cover may vary, depending on the kind of service you offer, there’s no reason you couldn’t broaden your horizon, if you’re ambitious, right? Well, one thing we often hear is that people find it […]

]]>Running a local service business is great, but if things are going well, why stop there? While the area you can cover may vary, depending on the kind of service you offer, there’s no reason you couldn’t broaden your horizon, if you’re ambitious, right? Well, one thing we often hear is that people find it hard to rank for other locations than their own. They simply don’t pop up in the search results for people in neighboring cities, provinces or states, even when they’re happy to make the trip.

Take, for example, a wedding photographer, who’s ready to hop in the car, travel to a location and take beautiful pictures for a couple that loves his or her photograpic style. It would be a shame if this couple from another area couldn’t find this photographer in the search results! So, what can you do if you want your service business to be found in a larger area?

Kelly Cammack and Danny O’Neil were struggling with this problem:

I run a nationwide service business but I’m having trouble ranking well for other cities than my own. My competitors have individual pages on their site, targeting large cities by using the city in the URL. These pages have similar copy and are overall thin. Is that really the best strategy to rank for more locations?

Watch the video or read the transcript for my answer!

How to rank your service business nationwide

“Well no, it’s not the best strategy but it’s always a hard thing to do this right. The best strategy would be to actually have locations in all those different locations, but nobody’s going to do that. So it is probably a way of trying to get there and trying to do it well, but I would make sure that they are not thin pages but bridge ones, pages where you show the references you have from that specific location, that show a bit more location specific content. It’s more work but it will end up ranking better in the long run. Good luck!”

]]>10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blog posthttps://yoast.com/seo-friendly-blog-post/
https://yoast.com/seo-friendly-blog-post/#commentsThu, 03 Jan 2019 13:00:37 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=229743Writing a well structured blog post and an SEO-friendly blog post at the same time can be a challenge, this guide helps you out!

]]>As with all writing, writing blog posts requires skill. To keep your reader interested, you should think about the structure of your piece and write appealing articles. You can help your readers grasp the core concept of a post by providing headings, subheadings and clear paragraphs. If people understand and like an article, they will be much more inclined to link, share and tweet about it – and that will increase your rankings. So, if you want to improve your rankings, improve your writing skills. Start with these tips on how to write an SEO-friendly blog post!

For some, writing for SEO purposes and writing to attract and captivate your audience could seem like two conflicting goals. I totally disagree. Indeed, if you want a readable and SEO-friendly blog post, the words you want to be found for should be in a very prominent place. But, over-using keywords severely hampers the readability of your text, which you definitely don’t want to do.

This post provides tips on writing blog posts that are both readable and SEO-friendly. These two goals should always go hand in hand.

Master SEO copywriting; write content that ranks! In our SEO copywriting training we teach you the skills you need to create copy that visitors and search engines love!

Before you start writing: keyword research

Before you can start writing, you have to do keyword research. If you want to dominate the search results, you’ll just have to figure out which words your audience actually searches for. These are the topics you should write about and the words you should use in your text.

Now, let’s start with some writing tips!

Key writing tips for good blog posts

Above all, your blog post has to be a good piece of writing! When starting a new blog post, many bloggers just start writing, typing whatever comes into their heads. While this may work for some people who have natural writing talents, others may need some help. Personally, I always follow these ‘rules’ when blogging.

1. Think before you write!

Think carefully about the message of your piece. What do you want to tell your readers or which central question do you want to answer? What’s the purpose of your article? And what do you want your readers to do at the end of the page? Write down the answers to these questions before you begin.

2. Devise a structure for your blog post

a conclusion (which should summarize the most important ideas or draw a conclusion).

Write down what you want to say in all three sections. You now have a kind of summary of your post. Now the real writing can begin.

3. Use paragraphs

Everybody uses paragraphs, but not everybody uses them well. Don’t start each new sentence on a new line, just because it looks nice. There should be a logical reason for starting a new paragraph. Each paragraph should have its own idea or subject. Ask yourself what the main idea of each paragraph is. You should be able to summarize that main idea in only one sentence. If you need more sentences, you simply need to use more paragraphs.

4. Use headings

Headings structure the whole page, so use them. They’re important not just for readability, but for SEO as well. Headings also help Google to grasp the main topics of a long post and therefore can help in your ranking. If you want people to find their way through your articles, you should use subheadings to lead people, help them scan your page, and clarify the structure of your articles. Make sure you use your keywords in some of the subheadings, but not in each and every one of them, as it will make the text clunky and unnatural, which will put people off reading further.

5. Use signal words

Signal words help people to scan through your text and grasp the main ideas. Let’s say, for example, that there are three reasons for people to buy your product. You should use signal words like: ‘first of all’; ‘secondly’ and ‘finally’. Also, words like ‘nevertheless’, ‘surely’ and ‘indeed’ give a clear signal to your readers. Readers will instantly get that a conclusion will follow after words like ‘consequently’, ’so’ or ‘for this reason’. Signal words are therefore very important to add structure to your text.

6. Let other people read your post

Before publishing your post, let someone else read it first. Ask them whether they understand the main concept of your post and invite them to correct any typos and grammatical errors.

7. Optimize the length of your article

Make sure your articles have a minimum of 300 words. Google likes long articles, however, if your article is too long – and not so easy to read – it might scare users away. Only try writing long articles when you know you’re a skilled writer. Check out this article if you want to know: “how long should my article be“. And don’t forget to use your focus keyphrase now and then!

8. Link to previous content

If you’ve already written content on the same topic as your current post, don’t forget to link these posts together. It will make your post stronger because you show some authority on the subject. As well as that, your link structure is also important for your Google rank. And of course, readers may be interested in reading these related posts too. If you want to read more about this you should read about internal linking for SEO.

9. Add content regularly

Regularly adding new blog posts to your website tells Google that your website is alive. If it’s not an active website, Google will crawl it less often, and this might negatively affect your rankings. But don’t just post for the sake of posting. Make sure you post high quality content: informative, well-written articles that fit people’s search intent.

10. Use our Yoast SEO plugin

The analysis tool in our Yoast SEO plugin helps you write SEO-friendly and readable blog posts. Start by choosing your focus keyword because this is the most important search term you want people to find this particular page for. Then it runs all kinds of checks to see whether your post is optimized well:

Our plugin checks your post to see whether you have used the keyphrase in the right places, like your copy, title, meta description, alt text and URL. Yoast SEO Premium will also recognize different word forms of your keyphrase.

It checks the readability of your text: Are your sentences or paragraphs too long? Do you use transition words?

It also checks if other pages on your website use the same focus keyword, to prevent you from competing with yourself.

If you write a relatively SEO-friendly blog post (based on the aspects discussed above) the plugin will indicate this with a green bullet. Pages with green bullets will help you improve the ranking of the pages on your website.

Note that not every dot has to be green for the overall SEO score to be “good”. For instance, these are the results of this post, which does have a “good” score:

Conclusion

The days when a few SEO tricks were enough to get your website to rank well in Google are long gone. Nowadays, quality content is king. And good content also leads to more links, shares, tweets and return visitors to your website. Of course, there are always other things you can do to maximize the SEO friendliness of your post, but most importantly, just write very, very good posts!

]]>https://yoast.com/seo-friendly-blog-post/feed/18the seo analysis in yoast seoSEO in 2019: Improve, improve, improvehttps://yoast.com/seo-in-the-new-year/
https://yoast.com/seo-in-the-new-year/#commentsWed, 02 Jan 2019 13:24:36 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1676425For most sites, SEO in 2019 is not much different from the past couple of years: you still need to improve the same stuff, but you do need to set the bar higher and higher. Competition is getting fiercer and Google — and your potential client — is getting better at recognizing true quality. Also, […]

]]>For most sites, SEO in 2019 is not much different from the past couple of years: you still need to improve the same stuff, but you do need to set the bar higher and higher. Competition is getting fiercer and Google — and your potential client — is getting better at recognizing true quality. Also, you need to take a step back to see if you are still reaching the right people at the right time. Search intent needs to determine your keyword research and content marketing decisions. Here, you’ll get a quick overview of SEO in 2019.

It’s all about quality

2019 is all about quality. Improving quality across the board should start with determining what exactly it is you do. Evaluate your products and services, and the way you describe these. Have trouble describing what you do? Well, maybe you need to go back to the drawing board. Your product must be excellent, as there is no use in trying to rank a sub-par product. No-one would fall for that. A killer product needs a killer site and a killer plan to get that site noticed.

SEO in 2019

I could talk about the rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning or conversational interactions, but I’m not going to do that. You should take note of these developments to see where search is heading, but for this moment, for most sites, it’s all about improving what you have right now. Site quality is key. So, these SEO trends for 2019 is not hyped up stuff, but subjects we’ve been hammering home for a while. Remember Holistic SEO?

A few weeks ago, we hosted our first live webinar titled ‘SEO in 2019’. Many of the points mentioned here were discussed in the webinar, so please watch it if you haven’t yet.

Mobile-first, yeah really

First up, 2019 is the year mobile-first truly is the default. Since Google switched over to mobile-first indexing, it judges your site by how it works on mobile, even when a lot of your traffic is from desktop. Give your mobile site special care. You should test whether your mobile site works just as well as your desktop site. Is the structured data functioning and complete? Do images have relevant alt-texts? Is the content complete and easy to read? Make it lightning fast, easy to use and useful.

Improve site quality

If you’ve been playing this game for a while, you’ve been working on your site for a long time. Over the years, there’s been a lot of talk about all the things you really should focus on because that’s what the search engines would be looking at. Experts claim to know a lot of the factors search engines take into account to rank a piece of content for a specific term. That’s simply not possible. While nobody knows exactly what happens behind the scenes of a search engine, you can look back over a greater period of time to determine trends. One thing that always keeps popping up?

Quality.

In 2019, your site needs to be technically flawless, offer a spectacular user experience and great content, targeted at the right audience at the right time in their user journey. And, of course, your site’s speed needs to improve. It also means incorporating and improving Schema structured data, as Schema.org is one of the key developments for next year.

Let’s go over some of the things you need to focus on in 2019.

Improve site speed

Site speed has been an important factor for a couple of years, but it is going to become critical. If you can’t keep up with your competition now, you’ll soon find yourself having a harder time keeping up if you’re not speeding up your site. If one of your competitors becomes a lot faster, you become slower by comparison, even when you’re not actually becoming slower. Improving loading time is a lot of work, but as it might make you much faster than the competition, it’s a very good tradeoff.

Enhance the user experience

Is your site a joy to use? Can you find what you need in a jiffy? Is the branding recognizable? How do you use images? Improving the user experience is a sure-fire way to make your — potential — customers happy. Happy customers make happy search engines!

Untangle your site structure

Loads of sites were started on a whim and have grown tremendously over time. Sometimes, all those categories, tags, posts and pages can feel like the roots of trees breaking up a sidewalk. It’s easy to lose control. You might know that keeping your site structure in check is beneficial for your visitors, as well as search engines. Everything should have its right place and if something is old, outdated or deprecated, maybe you should just delete it and point it to something relevant.

This year, you should pay special attention to your site structure. Re-assess your site structure and ask yourself if everything is still where it should be or are there improvements to be made? How’s your cornerstone content strategy? Is your internal linking up to scratch? Are redirects screwing with the flow of your site?

Implement Schema.org structured data

Structured data with Schema.org makes your content instantly understandable for search engines. Search engines use structured data to make connections between parts of your page and the world around it. It helps to provide context to your data. Besides making your site easier to understand, adding structured data to your site makes your site eligible for so-called rich results. There are many types of rich results, from star ratings to image highlights, and search engines continue to expand this. Structured data forms the basis of many of the most exciting developments of this moment, like voice search (speakable Schema!).

Implementing structured data is not very easy, but we’re working to get that problem solved. Our new structured data content blocks for the new WordPress block editor lets you automatically add valid structured data by simply picking a block and filling in the content. We now offer blocks for FAQ pages and How-to articles, with more on the way. In addition, we also have an online course on structured data.

Content quality

There is a ton of content out there — and there’s a lot of new content published every day. Why should your content be in the top ten for your chosen focus keyphrase? Is it really good enough to beat the competition?

Keep search intent front and center

Search intent is the why behind a search. What does this person mean to do with this search? Is it to find information or to buy something? Or maybe they’re just trying to find a specific website. Or is it something else entirely? Search engines are getting better and better at understanding this intent and the accompanying user behavior, although we need to help search engines pick the right version of our content. By determining the intent behind a search, you can map your keyword strategy to the specific intents a searcher has. Map these intents to your content and you’re good to go.

Re-do your keyword research

It’s high time to re-do your keyword research. There is bound to have been an enormous amount of changes in your market. Not only that, your company itself is bound to have changed. Not updating your keyword research is missing out on important opportunities. So go back and ask yourself these questions:

What changed in my company?

What changed in and around my audience?

What changed in people’s language?

What changed in where people search?

Content is context

Context is one of the most important words of the past year. Context is what helps search engines make sense of the world. As search engines become smarter and smarter, it is becoming more important to provide them with as much related information as possible. By offering the necessary context about your subject and entities, you can help search engines make the connection between your content and where that content fits in the grand scheme of things. It’s not just content; the links you add and how you add these links also provide context that helps search engines. Also, Schema provides another way to show search engines what’s connected.

By mapping the context of your subject, you might find you have a hole in your story. It could be that you haven’t fully explored your topic. Or maybe you found new ways of looking at it, or maybe science threw you a curveball. Who knows! Stay on top of your topic and incorporate everything you find. Sometimes, it also means going back through your old content to update, improve or fix things — or delete stuff entirely.

Re-assess the content and quality of your most important pages

If you are anything like us, you have been at this game for a while and produced loads of content in that time. That’s not a bad thing of course, unless you are starting to compete with yourself. Keyword cannibalization is one of the big issues these days. Content maintenance is a thing. Keep an eye on the search results of your chosen focus keyphrase. Do you have multiple articles in the top ten for a specific keyphrase? Well, that’s probably not what you want.

To find out how you are doing, you need to re-assess your content. Is everything in tip-top shape? Do you need to write more? Or less? Maybe combine several weaker articles in one strong one? Content pruning is going through your posts to see what you can take out to improve the rest. Sometimes, the best SEO strategy can be not to write more, but to improve what you have!

Hone those writing skills!

Quality content is well-written content. Quality content is original, in-depth and easy to understand. Search engines are getting better at determining the text quality of an article and make decisions based on that. Also, readers value well-written texts more and get a sense of trust from them. If content reads well and is factual and grammatically correct, it will come across more professional and people will be more likely to return to read more of your content. So, brush up those writing skills! We have an awesome SEO copywriting guide and an SEO copywriting course if you need help.

Search is on the move

As much as we’d like everything to happen on our website, it’s not. Depending on where you are and what you’re doing: your search engine optimization might need to happen elsewhere and not specifically in Google. For some searches and actions, search is moving beyond the website or social media platform. There are loads of devices that can answer a spoken question with a spoken answer. Devices that can book tickets for you or reserve a table. There are huge e-commerce platforms that seem to get the majority of product searches, not to mention all those app-based services out there. Visual search is also on the rise. Maybe these have value for you?

Conversational search (voice, assistants, bots)

Did you see that Google Duplex demo? That virtual assistant that called a barbershop to make an appointment for its owner? How cool was that, right? Well, that’s one type of conversation we can expect soon. Virtual assistants will become mainstream and voice search one of the easiest ways to search for stuff. We will even be able to turn a single question into a dialogue, complete with action points.

Conversational searches differ from the searches we type in the text field. When we ask a question out loud, we make it a full sentence, which we hardly do while typing. Not to mention that we often use a location and add a value to the voice search. It has to be seen if every company should adopt a voice search strategy. It is something you should look at, though. If it makes sense for you, please do!

(Progressive web) apps

Links to apps are continuing to pop up in search, especially on mobile. Loads of sites bombard you with links to their apps on the home screen. Some services are app-only, like Uber. Apps are everywhere, even Google is now testing structured data for software apps. What’s more, Google is expanding its own homepage on mobile with a Discover feed app.

Where’s an app, there’s a customer to reach. Uber might be the ultimate taxi hailing service, but why can’t a local taxi company replicate that? Apps offer another way — and sometimes better way — of reaching your audience. Depending on your product and market, it might be a good idea to look into apps. If you’re not willing to go down the native route, there’s always progressive web apps — which we’ll see a lot off this year!

Other platforms

Traditionally, a lot of search happens not on search engines, but social media and other types of platforms. Now, this past year we’ve seen a steady decline in traffic and conversion coming from social media. Totally different platforms are taking their place. YouTube is a powerful search engine, as is Amazon. And did you see the meteoric rise of alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo? People are getting more privacy-aware, which is a good thing! Depending on the searcher and his/her goal, platforms like these are becoming increasingly important. Surely, something to think about!

One system for getting traffic in 2019

Now, if we’d recap all this, what does it all boil down to? We know it sounds easy when you read it like this, but this is what you should keep in your head at all times:

You should have a fast, easily usable, technically flawless website with high-quality content that truly helps visitors.

This website needs to be supported by a brand that offers high-quality products and services.

Depending on your niche, this might also mean that you need an app strategy or a strategy for an external platform.

SEO in 2019: What’s next?

It’s easy to say that your site must be better than ever in 2019, because it’s true! Those ten blue links and rich search results are what it’s all about for most sites. The majority of traffic will still come from organic search. Social media traffic is down, conversational search is on the rise, but not big enough to put a dent in organic. So you have to keep improving your site in all the right places.

Of course, there’s a lot of other stuff happening at the same time and most of it concerns an ever-changing Google. Next year, we’ll start to see Google less as a search engine and more as a visual assistant — a person who lives in your phone and solves problems for you. And that’s what they want to get to. It’s been a promise for a long time, but now we’re starting to see it with all these rich results and answer boxes. This will be interesting to watch.

]]>https://yoast.com/seo-in-the-new-year/feed/16SEO in 2019: Improve, improve, improve &bull; YoastSEO in 2019 is all about making your site better than ever. Quality is key. Your site and content should be flawless, useful and engaging!seo in 2019Related sites sharing pages: what to consider?https://yoast.com/video/ask-yoast-sites-sharing-pages/
Fri, 28 Dec 2018 12:20:59 +0000https://yoast.com/?post_type=yoast_videos&p=1670911Many of our readers manage multiple sites, in all kinds of different configurations and setups. It’s certainly viable, for example, to manage two or several sites to support the same business. In that case, you might save some time linking between the pages of these sites. Your sites could share the shop pages, and posts […]

]]>Many of our readers manage multiple sites, in all kinds of different configurations and setups. It’s certainly viable, for example, to manage two or several sites to support the same business. In that case, you might save some time linking between the pages of these sites. Your sites could share the shop pages, and posts relevant for both sites might be reused. If you give some thought to what content you want to rank, and which of these sites is most important, this can be effective.

But, what if one of your sites isn’t well optimized and contains thin content? Is it still OK if such a site shares pages with a well-optimized website, or will the latter suffer lower rankings by association?

Craig Hamilton Parker emailed us, wondering the same thing:

I have two websites on the same server. They’re on different topics, but need to share some pages, such as the shop and events page and related topics on the two sites. One site is well optimized using Yoast. The other isn’t well optimized and has a few thin pages. Is it safe to link between the sites without using rel=nofollow?

Watch the video or read the transcript for my answer!

Handling sites that share pages

“Yes, it’s safe. In fact, if they have the same pages on both sides, I would pick one – the well-optimized one- and canonicalize the other one to the well-optimized one, so you do not create duplicate content.

You want to show to Google that you’re aware that you have two pagesthat are basically the same thing and show them which one they should index. But overall there’s not really that much wrong with having that.

It’s just better to figure out yourselves which ones you want in the search engines and which ones you don’t want in the search engines. If you want both of them in the search engines, you’ll have to give them different content. Good luck.”

]]>rel=canonical: the ultimate guidehttps://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/#commentsMon, 24 Dec 2018 13:14:12 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=319185The canonical URL allows you to tell search engines that certain similar URLs are actually one and the same. Learn how to use rel=canonical!

]]>A canonical URL lets you tell search engines that certain similar URLs are actually the same. Sometimes you have products or content that can be found on multiple URLs – or even multiple websites, but by using canonical URLs (HTML link tags with the attribute rel=canonical), you can have these on your site without harming your rankings.

The rel=canonical element, often called the “canonical link”, is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues. It does this by specifying the “canonical URL”, the “preferred” version of a web page – the original source, even. Using it well improves a site’s SEO.

The idea is simple: if you have several similar versions of the same content, you pick one “canonical” version and point the search engines at it. This solves the duplicate content problem where search engines don’t know which version of the content to show in their results. This article takes you through how and when to use them, and how to avoid common mistakes.

The SEO benefit of rel=canonical

Choosing a proper canonical URL for every set of similar URLs improves the SEO of your site. This is because the search engine knows which version is canonical, so it can count all the links pointing at all the different versions as links to the canonical version. Setting a canonical is similar in concept to a 301 redirect, only without actually redirecting.

History of rel=canonical

In February 2009 Google, Bing and Yahoo! introduced the canonical link element – if you want to learn about its history, Matt Cutts’ post gives the clearest explanation. While the idea is simple, the specifics of how to use it are often complex.

The process of canonicalization

Ironic side note

The term Canonical comes from from the Roman Catholic tradition, where a list of sacred books was created and accepted as genuine and named the canonical Gospels of the New Testament. The irony is it took the Roman Catholic church about 300 years and numerous fights to come up with the canonical list, and they eventually chose four versions of the same story…

When you have several choices for a product’s URL, canonicalization is the process of picking one of them. In many cases, it’ll be obvious: one URL will be a better choice than others. In some cases, it might not be as obvious, but even then it’s still pretty simple: just pick one! Not canonicalizing your URLs is always worse than canonicalizing your URLs.

How to set canonical URLs

Correct example of using rel=canonical

Let’s assume you have two versions of the same page, each with exactly – 100% – the same content. The only difference is that they’re in separate sections of your site and because of that the background color and the active menu item are different – that’s it. Both versions have been linked to from other sites, so the content itself is clearly valuable. So which version should search engines show in results?

For example, these could be their URLs:

http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/

http://example.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

This is what rel=canonical was invented for and, unfortunately, this happens fairly often, especially in a lot of e-commerce systems. A product can have several different URLs depending on how you got there. In this case you would apply rel=canonical as follows:

Pick one of your two pages as the canonical version. This should be the version you think is the most important. If you don’t care, pick the one with the most links or visitors, and if all else is equal, flip a coin. You just need to choose.

Add a rel=canonical link from the non-canonical page to the canonical one. So if we picked the shortest URL as our canonical URL, the other URL would link to the shortest URL in the <head> section of the page – like this:

What this does is “merge” the two pages into one from a search engine’s perspective. It’s a “soft redirect”, without redirecting the user. Links to both URLs now count as the single, canonical version of the URL.

Setting the canonical in Yoast SEO

Our Yoast SEO WordPress plugin lets you change the canonical of several page types in the plugin settings. You only need to do this if you want to change the canonical to something different from the current page’s URL. Yoast SEO already renders the correct canonical URL for almost any page type in a WordPress install.

For posts, pages, and custom post types, you can edit the canonical in the advanced tab of the Yoast SEO metabox:

For categories, tags and other taxonomy terms, you can change them in the same place in the Yoast SEO metabox too. If you have other advanced use cases, you can also use the wpseo_canonical filter to change the Yoast SEO output.

When should you use canonical URLs?

301 redirect or canonical?

If you are unsure whether to do a 301 redirect or set a canonical, what should you do? The answer is simple: you should always do a redirect, unless there are technical reasons not to. If you can’t redirect because that would harm the user experience or be otherwise problematic, then set a canonical URL.

Should a page have a self-referencing canonical URL?

In the example above, we link the non-canonical page to the canonical version. But should a page set a rel=canonical for itself? This question is a much-debated topic amongst SEOs. At Yoast, we strongly recommend having a canonical link element on every page and Google has confirmed that’s best. That’s because most CMS’s will allow URL parameters without changing the content. So all of these URLs would show the same content:

http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/

http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/?isnt=it-awesome

http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/?cmpgn=twitter

http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/?cmpgn=facebook

The issue is that if you don’t have a self-referencing canonical on the page that points to the cleanest version of the URL, you risk being hit by this. If you don’t do it yourself, someone else could do it to you and cause a duplicate content issue, so adding a self-referencing canonical to URLs across your site is a good “defensive” SEO move. Luckily, our Yoast SEO plugin does this for you.

Cross-domain canonical URLs

Perhaps you have the same piece of content on several domains. There are sites or blogs that republish articles from other websites on their own, as they feel the content is relevant for their users. In the past, we had websites republishing articles from Yoast.com as well (with express permission), but if you had looked at the HTML of every one of those articles you’d found a rel=canonical link pointing right back to our original article. This means all the links pointing to their version of the article count towards the ranking of our canonical version. They get to use our content to please their audience, and we get a clear benefit from it too. Everybody wins.

Faulty canonical URLs: common issues

There are many examples out there of how a wrong rel=canonical implementation can lead to huge issues. I’ve seen several sites where the canonical on their homepage was pointed at an article, only to see their home page disappear from search results. There are other things you should never do with rel=canonical. Here are the most important:

Don’t canonicalize a paginated archive to page 1. The rel=canonical on page 2 should point to page 2. If you point it to page 1, search engines will actually not index the links on those deeper archive pages…

Make them 100% specific. For various reasons, many sites use protocol-relative links, meaning they leave the http / https bit from their URLs. Don’t do this for your canonicals. You have a preference, so show it.

Base your canonical on the request URL. If you use variables like the domain or request URL used to access the current page while generating your canonical, you’re doing it wrong. Your content should be aware of its own URLs. Otherwise, you could still have the same piece of content on – for instance – example.com and www.example.com and have each of them canonicalize to themselves.

Multiple rel=canonical links on a page causing havoc. When we encounter this in WordPress plugins, we try to reach out to the developer doing it and teach them not to, but it still happens. And when it does, the results are wholly unpredictable.

rel=canonical and social networks

Facebook and Twitter honor rel=canonical too, and this might lead to weird situations. If you share a URL on Facebook that has a canonical pointing elsewhere, Facebook will share the details from the canonical URL. In fact, if you add a ‘like’ button on a page that has a canonical pointing elsewhere, it will show the like count for the canonical URL, not for the current URL. Twitter works in the same way.

Advanced uses of rel=canonical

Canonical link HTTP header

Google also supports a canonical link HTTP header. The header looks like this:

Link: <http://www.example.com/white-paper.pdf>;
rel="canonical"

Canonical link HTTP headers can be very useful when canonicalizing files like PDFs, so it’s good to know that the option exists.

Using rel=canonical on not so similar pages

While I wouldn’t recommend this, you can definitely use rel=canonical very aggressively. Google honors it to an almost ridiculous extent, where you can canonicalize a very different piece of content to another piece of content. However, if Google catches you doing this, it will stop trusting your site’s canonicals and thus cause you more harm…

Using rel=canonical in combination with hreflang

We also talk about canonical in our ultimate guide to hreflang. That’s because it’s very important that when you use hreflang, each language’s canonical points to itself. Make sure that you understand how to use canonical well when you’re implementing hreflang, as otherwise you might kill your entire hreflang implementation.

Conclusion: rel=canonical is a power tool

Rel=canonical is a powerful tool in an SEO’s toolbox, but like any power tool, you should use it wisely as it’s easy to cut yourself. For larger sites, the process of canonicalization can be very important and lead to major SEO improvements.

]]>https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/feed/19Setting a canonical in Yoast SEOComment systems and SEOhttps://yoast.com/video/ask-yoast-comment-systems-and-seo/
Fri, 21 Dec 2018 14:30:06 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=1318562Allowing people to comment on your content is a great way to increase engagement and get in touch with your audience. So, it pays off to choose a good comment system that works for you. Besides the standard WordPress comment system, there are several other systems out there you can implement on your website so […]

]]>Allowing people to comment on your content is a great way to increase engagement and get in touch with your audience. So, it pays off to choose a good comment system that works for you. Besides the standard WordPress comment system, there are several other systems out there you can implement on your website so your readers can directly respond to your posts.

It’s good to keep some things in mind when selecting what comment system you want to use. Do you want integration with social media, for example? Do you want to be able to keep your comments if you ever need to change your comment system, and what features do you require? You may want more functionalities than WordPress’ standard comment system provides and could therefore choose another system. But are there really no downsides to that, keeping the importance of site speed in mind? What about comment systems and SEO? Let’s get into this dilemma in this week’s Ask Yoast!

Max sent us his question on comment systems:

There is no question that the Disqus service takes a little while to load on a webpage. So, do these blog commenting services, like Disqus, affect SEO in some way?

Watch the video or read the transcript for my answer!

The impact of comment systems on SEO

“Do they affect SEO? Well, yes, they do. Because, in fact, they’re so slow to load that most of the time, what you see is that Google doesn’t load the content of those comments, and doesn’t use them to rank that page. Which might be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how good your comments are and whether your comments have a lot of content or not.

I personally don’t like these services because they slow down the page load so much and because they make it slower for people to be able to respond to your content, which is why, on yoast.com, we use the plain vanilla WordPress commenting system with some added features that are in the Yoast Comment Hacks plugin, which we’ve released for free on the repository. So that’s why we use that, and not any service like Disqus. But I know there’s a lot of fans of services like Disqus because of all the other features they have. So it’s a trade-off. We made our choice, you have to make yours. Good luck!”

]]>How to kick-start 2019 as a blogger with big goalshttps://yoast.com/how-to-kick-start-2019-as-a-blogger-with-big-goals/
https://yoast.com/how-to-kick-start-2019-as-a-blogger-with-big-goals/#commentsThu, 20 Dec 2018 14:27:52 +0000https://yoast.com/?p=16746332018 is the year I took my blog to the next level: I started a blog series here on yoast.com about SEO for bloggers, I made goals, achieved a lot and failed a few as well. I tried to plan, failed miserably and tried again, with success. In short: in 2018 I found my love […]

]]>2018 is the year I took my blog to the next level: I started a blog series here on yoast.com about SEO for bloggers, I made goals, achieved a lot and failed a few as well. I tried to plan, failed miserably and tried again, with success. In short: in 2018 I found my love for blogging (again) and experimented a lot. 2019 is approaching fast though and I want to prepare properly. I don’t want to make the same mistakes I made this year and I’d like to reach the goals and resolutions I’ve set. So, here’s a plan (for you and me) to kickstart 2019 as a blogger with big goals.

Write down your blogging goals

Whether you want to grow to 50,000 visitors a month, want to launch an eBook, get more collaborations, or all three: write down each and every single one of your goals of 2019. By writing down your goals, you’re already way more committed to them than by just saying them out loud. Take that advantage! Write them down somewhere where you’ll see them regularly, for example on your blog notebook or on a memo board in your office. Seeing goals regularly and thinking about them often, will help you stay on top of them.

Please note that your goal should be realistic. If you want to grow your audience and your blog has 500 visitors now, it might not be entirely achievable to aim for 100,000 visitors by December 2019. Especially, if you’re unsure about how to reach such a growth.

Plan time to work on your goals

The biggest thing we all face, is time. Particularly, if your blog is a hobby – or just not your main source of income – it’s often the first thing you put aside when life throws you a curveball. I didn’t publish blogs for almost two months on my personal blog as I was very busy with other projects, hobbies and making up excuses why I just couldn’t spend time on my blog.

Because I don’t want this to happen again in 2019, I need blog posts written in advance. That’s why I planned a blog weekend in the beginning of January. I’ve done this back in September as well and managed to write over 30 blog posts in just three days. So in January I booked a cottage together with a fellow blogger and we’ll spend our days writing. The goal? To create flow, creativity and content.

Focus on one task at a time

If you’re in a writing flow, you should continue to write, even if your blog post is finished. Do not fall into the trap of finishing your writing to start photographing and scheduling or promoting the blog post. Continue working on other blog posts! If you combine your tasks, you’ll be much more efficient. That could mean that you first write a few blog posts, then start photographing for all blog posts and then schedule or fine-tune them. You’ll switch less between tasks, which makes your focus and the results that much better.

I’ve spoken to bloggers who link certain days to certain tasks. On Mondays they’ll create their images; on Tuesdays they’ll focus on their Pinterest scheduling; on Wednesdays they’ll write new content and so forth. Because you’re focused, you’ll get things done much quicker. You have to find out if this works for you or not, it will help you get the tasks you otherwise wouldn’t do, on your to do list.

Finish your tasks

If you focus on one task at a time, the biggest trap you could fall in is never publishing some of your post. While I was writing in a cottage back in September, the internet was horrible. This meant I couldn’t schedule my posts properly, nor find stock photos if necessary. Now, I’ve only published 12 of the 32 blog posts I’ve written back then. Are the other 20 not worth publishing? No, they definitely are! I just never finished them. I’ve never proofread them, took photos, nor scheduled them. And now, I have an issue with even looking at those blog posts, as it all feels like a waste.

Often our biggest critic, is within us. If we want to grow, we should befriend it and be willing to silence it every once in a while. You can’t write blog posts in advance, if you let your inner critic out too often. You’ll never be able to finish everything, if you let the perfectionist in you speak all the time. Often ‘good enough’ really is good enough.

Find bloggers like yourself

To stay on top of your goals, it’s very helpful to have bloggers to chat to. The last year I met various bloggers like me on blogging conferences. I’ve even become close friends with a few of them. We often message each other for help, tips and the likes. Are you unsure why and if networking is something for you? I’ve written a post on the importance of networking as a blogger!

Reflect each month

Whenever you set your year goals, don’t forget you should set monthly goals and maybe even weekly and daily goals that link to the bigger goals. This way, your goal stays within reach and doesn’t feel like something in the far distance. You’ll make small progress with every step you take. By the end of each month, you need to check if you made progress and if it’s the progress you aimed for. If not, find out why you didn’t reach it. Did you aim too high? Or did you neglect to do what you should’ve done? Whatever the reason is, accept that sometimes you fail. You always have a new month and a new day to try again!

I would love to hear from you what your goals for 2019 are, how you want to reach them and what you would like to learn from me in 2019!